The Most Influential People Across History
Find the most influential people in 24 academic disciplines and numerous subdisciplines
Find famous and important people related to your research. This is an excellent tool for research papers, topic papers, and building a bibliography. Using our influence-based algorithm, our rankings synthesize data from Wikipedia, Wikidata, Semantic Scholar, and CrossRef.
Students and researchers now have a fast and reliable way to find influential thinkers from 24 disciplines and 300 sub-disciplines (and growing). If you want to find history’s most influential philsosophers, or the world’s most influential mathematicians currently, now you can.
We also provide custom rankings of people by discipline as well as interviews with influential academics who are currently active.
To use this tool, select the discipline (and optional subdiscipline) relevant to your research, and specify influential academics by history, world, or US. Even results that are counterintuitive are often enlightening (our algorithm always picks up a signal).
Methodology: How and Why We Rank by Influence …
See additional learning tools, study tips, features on campus life and much more at our Student Resources Headquarters.
List of the most influential people in Philosophy,
#16001
Samuel Goldflam
1852 - 1932 (80 years)
Samuel Wulfowicz Goldflam was a Polish-Jewish neurologist best known for his brilliant 1893 analysis of myasthenia gravis . Biography Goldflam received his education in his native city of Warsaw. He graduated from secondary school in 1869, then studied medicine at Warsaw University. He qualified as a physician in 1875, then worked in internal medicine at Holy Ghost Hospital under Professor Wilhelm Dusan Lambl , known for the giardia parasite, Lamblia intestinalis. Lambl was not much of a mentor, so Goldflam worked largely by himself. His position at the internal-medicine clinic supplied him with ample research material.
Go to Profile#16002
Gilbert Girdwood
1832 - 1917 (85 years)
Gilbert Prout Girdwood was an English army and civilian physician and surgeon, academic and author, noted for his service in the Canadian Army. He was a pioneer in medical education and radiography in Canada.
Go to Profile#16003
Nikolai Zhilyayev
1881 - 1938 (57 years)
Nikolay Sergeyevich Zhilyayev , was a musicologist, and the teacher of several 20th-century composers. He was a victim of political repression in the Soviet Union. He was a pupil of Mikhail Ippolitov-Ivanov and Sergei Taneyev at the Moscow Conservatory in around 1904. He went on to teach there himself. His pupils included the composers Yevgeny Golubev, Aram Khachaturian, Lev Knipper, Alexei Fedorovich Kozlovsky, Alexei Vladimirovich Stanchinsky, Anatoly Nikolayevich Alexandrov and Samuil Evgenyevich Feinberg.
Go to Profile#16004
Charles H. Fernald
1838 - 1921 (83 years)
Charles Henry Fernald was an American entomologist, geologist, and zoologist, who is credited as the first college professor of economic entomology. Fernald grew up at Fernald Point in Mount Desert, Maine, and went on to prepare for college at Maine Wesleyan Seminary before joining the navy in 1862. After receiving a master's degree from Bowdoin College he went on to serve as principal of several academies in Maine. Throughout his career he would document and describe several species of microlepidoptera and in 1886 became the first full-time professor and chair of the natural sciences at what is now the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
Go to Profile#16005
John Wickham Legg
1843 - 1921 (78 years)
John Wickham Legg was an English physician and published on medical subjects, and later almost exclusively on liturgy and ecclesiology. Life and career He was the third son of the printer and bookseller George Legg, and was born at Alverstoke near Portsmouth in Hampshire, England, on 28 December 1843. He was educated at Winchester College and from there he went to New College, Oxford and subsequently opted to read Medicine at University College, London, where he studied under Sir William Jenner. Having qualified as a member of the Royal College of Surgeons, he was recommended by Jenner for th...
Go to Profile#16006
Sam Charles
1887 - 1949 (62 years)
Sam Charles was an American artist, pianist and professor. He was born in Agawam, Massachusetts, and was a life-long New Englander, living primarily in Wellesley, Massachusetts. He served on the music faculty of Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts and at Groton School. He admired and performed the music of modern French composers, particularly Claude Debussy. He was a well-known New England artist, painting primarily landscapes in watercolor, with a unique, free-flowing style, making skilled use of unpainted space.
Go to Profile#16007
Francis Darby Boyd
1866 - Present (160 years)
Francis Darby Boyd CB CMG FRCPEd was a Scottish physician, and Professor of Clinical Medicine at the University of Edinburgh. Life Boyd was born on 19 October 1866, at 27 Melville Street, Edinburgh. His aunt Mary was married to Francis Darby Syme, who is Boyd’s namesake.
Go to Profile#16008
Johannes Walaeus
1607 - 1649 (42 years)
Johannes Walaeus was a Dutch physician and illustrious professor at the Faculty of Medicine in Leiden University. He was graduated Doctor of Medicine in 1631, when he defended his dissertation, entitled Disputiatio medica de febribus at Leiden University. Two years after that, he was nominated Professor extraordinarius. In 1648, he was offered full professorship at Leiden University. Johannes Walaeus was a son of the theologian Antonius Walaeus.
Go to Profile#16009
William Armstrong, 1st Baron Armstrong
1810 - 1900 (90 years)
William George Armstrong, 1st Baron Armstrong, was an English engineer and industrialist who founded the Armstrong Whitworth manufacturing concern on Tyneside. He was also an eminent scientist, inventor and philanthropist. In collaboration with the architect Richard Norman Shaw, he built Cragside in Northumberland, the first house in the world to be lit by hydroelectricity. He is regarded as the inventor of modern artillery.
Go to Profile#16010
William Henry Hadow
1859 - 1937 (78 years)
Sir William Henry Hadow was a leading educational reformer in Great Britain, a musicologist and a composer. Life Born at Ebrington in Gloucestershire and baptised there on 29 January 1860 by his father, he was the eldest child of the Reverend William Elliot Hadow and his wife Mary Lang Cornish . His grandfather, the Reverend William Thomas Hadow, had married Eleanor Ann Bethune, daughter of Colonel John Drinkwater Bethune.
Go to Profile#16011
J. Ph. Vogel
1871 - 1958 (87 years)
Jean Philippe Vogel , popularly known by his initials J. Ph. Vogel, was a Dutch Sanskritist and epigraphist who worked with the Archaeological Survey of India from 1901 to 1914 and later, as Professor in the University of Leiden.
Go to Profile#16012
Sir Robert Jones, 1st Baronet
1857 - 1933 (76 years)
Sir Robert Jones, 1st Baronet, was a Welsh orthopaedic surgeon who helped to establish the modern specialty of orthopaedic surgery in Britain. He was an early proponent of the use of radiography in orthopaedics, and in 1902 described the eponymous Jones fracture.
Go to Profile#16013
Leslie Walton
1895 - 1960 (65 years)
Leslie Bannister Walton was an academic in Hispanic Studies at the University of Edinburgh and a Hispanist. Life Walton was educated at University College, London and Jesus College, Oxford, where he was awarded a first-class degree in medieval and modern languages. His association with the University of Edinburgh began in 1920, and he rose to become Forbes Reader in Spanish and head of the Department of Hispanic Studies. His writings included a critical study of the Spanish novelist Perez Galdos and editions of classical Spanish works. He also lectured for the Ministry of Information and the British Council in Spain and South America.
Go to Profile#16014
A. N. Murthy Rao
1900 - 2003 (103 years)
Akkihebbalu Narasimha Murthy Rao was an Indian writer. He wrote in Kannada. Biography Kannadiga scholar and critic A. N. Murthy Rao, popularly known for his book "Devaru", was born on June 18, 1900, in Akkihebbal, Mandya district. He was born to M. Subbarao and Puttamma. He spent his childhood in Melukote and Nagamangala. After completing his early education at Wesley Mission School in Mysore in 1913, he joined Mysore Maharaja's College. He completed his B.A. in 1922 and M.A. in 1924.
Go to Profile#16015
Julian Aleksandrowicz
1908 - 1988 (80 years)
Julian Aleksandrowicz was a Polish medical professional, professor of medicine, and a notable specialist on leukemia. He is known for having developed concepts of comprehensive psychotherapy of persons suffering from somatic diseases, as well as of the ecological prevention of cancer and leukaemia.
Go to Profile#16016
Mary J. Safford
1834 - 1891 (57 years)
Mary Jane Safford-Blake was a nurse, physician, educator, and humanitarian. As a nurse in the Union army she worked closely with Mary Ann Bickerdyke treating the sick and injured near Fort Donelson, and was nicknamed the "Cairo Angel" for her service in Cairo, Illinois. After the war she became one of the first female gynecologists in the United States and was the first woman to perform an ovariotomy. She later taught at Boston University, and was one of the first women elected to the Boston School Committee.
Go to Profile#16017
Marcus Whitman
1802 - 1847 (45 years)
Marcus Whitman was an American physician and missionary. In 1836, Marcus Whitman led an overland party by wagon to the West. He and his wife, Narcissa, along with Reverend Henry Spalding and his wife, Eliza, and William Gray, founded a mission at present-day Walla Walla, Washington in an effort to convert local Indians to Christianity. In the winter of 1842, Whitman went back east, returning the following summer with the first large wagon train of settlers across the Oregon Trail. These new settlers encroached on the Cayuse Indians living near the Whitman Mission and were unsuccessful in their efforts to Christianize the tribe.
Go to Profile#16018
Jan Krzysztof Damel
1780 - 1840 (60 years)
Jan Krzysztof Damel, also known as Jonas Damelis and Johann Damehl in other languages was a Polish neoclassicist artist in the age of Partitions, associated with the School of Art at Vilnius University .
Go to Profile#16019
Friedrich Boerner
1723 - 1761 (38 years)
Friedrich Boerner or Börner was a German physician. Boerner was born in Leipzig. His father, Christian Friedrich Boerner, wanted him to study theology and he started to study theology at the University of Wittenberg, but eventually he finish medicine. He was a professor of this university until he had to come back to Leipzig the raising of Seven Years' War . He died in Leipzig in 1761.
Go to Profile#16020
Jeshua ben Judah
Jeshua ben Judah was a Karaite scholar, exegete and philosopher, who lived in eleventh-century Iraq or at Jerusalem. He was pupil of Joseph ben Abraham ha-Ro'eh. Jeshua was considered one of the highest authorities among the Karaites, by whom he is called "the great teacher" .
Go to Profile#16021
Grigory Gurev
1891 - 1978 (87 years)
Grigory Abramovich Gurev was a Soviet philosopher, popularizer of anti-religious knowledge, the author of several books on the history of religion and atheism. Major works: "The Great Conflict" , "The Story of a Single Misconception" , "Charles Darwin and Atheism" .
Go to Profile#16022
Maksim Sedej
1909 - 1974 (65 years)
Maksim Sedej was a Slovene painter, one of the key figures of the mid-20th-century art scene in Slovenia. Sedej was born in Dobračeva on the northern outskirts of Žiri in 1909. He studied art at the Zagreb Academy of Fine Arts between 1928 and 1932. His work was exhibited amid the selection of Yugoslav art at the Venice Biennale in 1940 and 1954. He worked as a professor at the Ljubljana Academy of Fine Arts and Design.
Go to Profile#16023
Arnold Walter
1902 - 1973 (71 years)
Arnold Maria Walter, OC was a Canadian musicologist, educator, composer and writer. He founded the Canadian Opera Company, and was Director of Music at University of Toronto. Early years Arnold Maria Walter was born in Hanušovice, Moravia, Austria-Hungary . He studied law at the University of Prague, then musicology at the University of Berlin. In addition, he had private music lessons in piano and composition with Rudolf Breithaupt, Frederic Lamond, and Franz Schreker.
Go to Profile#16024
Martha H. Mowry
1818 - 1899 (81 years)
Martha H. Mowry was an American physician and the first woman physician in the U.S. state of Rhode Island. She was also an advocate for women's suffrage and human welfare reform. Early life and education
Go to Profile#16025
Miles Vandahurst Lynk
1871 - 1956 (85 years)
Miles Vandahurst Lynk was an American physician and author noted for his efforts to create opportunities for African Americans in science, specifically for medical doctors. He was known both as the founder, editor and publisher of Medical and Surgical Observer , as well as founding the University of West Tennessee College of Medicine and Surgery.
Go to Profile#16026
Leó Weiner
1885 - 1960 (75 years)
Leó Weiner was one of the leading Hungarian music educators of the first half of the twentieth century, and a composer. Life Education Weiner was born in Budapest to a Jewish family. His brother gave him his first music and piano lessons. As children, he and Fritz Reiner played piano four hands.
Go to Profile#16027
Archibald Menzies
1754 - 1842 (88 years)
Archibald Menzies was a Scottish surgeon, botanist and naturalist. He spent many years at sea, serving with the Royal Navy, private merchants, and the Vancouver Expedition. He was the first recorded European to reach the summit of the Hawaiian volcano Mauna Loa and introduced the Monkey Puzzle tree to England.
Go to Profile#16028
John Blund
1175 - 1248 (73 years)
John Blund was an English scholastic philosopher, known for his work on the nature of the soul, the Tractatus de anima, one of the first works of western philosophy to make use of the recently translated De Anima by Aristotle and especially the Persian philosopher Avicenna's work on the soul, also called De Anima. He taught at Oxford University along with Edmund of Abingdon. David Knowles said that he was "noteworthy for his knowledge of Avicenna and his rejection of the hylomorphism of Avicebron and the plurality of forms.", although the problem of the plurality of forms as understood by later scholastics was not formulated explicitly in Blund's time.
Go to Profile#16029
Selma Feldbach
1878 - 1924 (46 years)
Selma Feldbach was the first Estonian woman to become a medical doctor. In 1904 she graduated in medicine from the University of Bern.
Go to Profile#16030
Andreas Anagnostakis
1826 - 1897 (71 years)
Andreas Anagnostakis was a Greek ophthalmologist, physician, and educator. He is best known for inventing the ophthalmoscope, a handheld tool used in diagnostics and still relevant today. He is credited as the first ophthalmologist in Greece.
Go to Profile#16031
Henry Cadwalader Chapman
1845 - 1909 (64 years)
Dr. Henry Cadwalader Chapman was an American physician and naturalist. Early life Chapman was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Henry was the son of George W. Chapman, lieutenant in the United States Army, and Emily, granddaughter of Abraham Markoe, first captain of the Philadelphia City Troop. His grandfather was Dr. Nathaniel Chapman, the founding president of the American Medical Association.
Go to Profile#16032
Ernst Wertheim
1864 - 1920 (56 years)
Ernst Wertheim was an Austrian gynecologist born in Graz. Ernst Wertheim was the son of Theodor Wertheim, an Austrian chemistry professor at the University of Graz, remembered for his chemical studies of garlic. He received his doctorate from the University of Graz on February 29, 1888, and subsequently became an assistant in the department of general and experimental pathology. In 1889 he worked under Otto Kahler at the second university clinic in Vienna, followed by an assignment at the second Vienna women's clinic under Rudolf Chrobak . He worked there until September 30, 1890, when he relocated to Prague as an assistant to Friedrich Schauta at the university women’s clinic.
Go to Profile#16033
August Weber
1817 - 1873 (56 years)
Johann Baptist Wilhelm August Weber was a German painter; associated with the Düsseldorfer Malerschule. Life and work He began studying landscape painting in his hometown, with Carl Heinrich Rosenkranz , then moved to Darmstadt in 1835, where he continued his studies with the court painter, Johann Heinrich Schilbach. This was followed by a study trip to Switzerland.
Go to Profile#16034
Bence Szabolcsi
1899 - 1973 (74 years)
Bence Szabolcsi was a Hungarian music historian. Along with Ervin Major, "he can be considered the founder of scholarly study of the history of Hungarian music, and he was primarily responsible for creating an establishment for musicology in Hungary."
Go to Profile#16035
A.Y.P. Garnett
1820 - 1888 (68 years)
#16036
Hermann Eichhorst
1849 - 1921 (72 years)
Hermann Ludwig Eichhorst was a German-Swiss internist born in Königsberg. He studied medicine in Königsberg and Berlin, and was an assistant to Ernst Viktor von Leyden , Bernhard Naunyn , and Friedrich Theodor von Frerichs . In 1884 became director of the medical clinic in Zurich, where he remained for the rest of his career.
Go to Profile#16037
Alfred William Alcock
1859 - 1933 (74 years)
Alfred William Alcock was a British physician, naturalist, and carcinologist. Early life and education Alcock was the son of a sea-captain, John Alcock in Bombay, India who retired to live in Blackheath. His mother was a daughter of Christopher Puddicombe, the only son of a Devon squire.
Go to Profile#16038
Rudolph Bergh
1824 - 1909 (85 years)
Rudolph Bergh , full name Ludvig Sophus Rudolph Bergh, was a Danish physician and malacologist. He worked in Copenhagen. As a doctor his speciality was sexually transmitted diseases. In Copenhagen a hospital and a street are named after him.
Go to Profile#16039
Jan Dullaert
1471 - 1513 (42 years)
Jan Dullaert of Ghent Latinized as Ioannis Dullardi was a Flemish philosopher and logician who lived in France as an Augustinian friar. He elucidated principles of propositional logic in his commentaries on the works of Aristotle published from 1506 to 1509.
Go to Profile#16040
Ibn al-Sīd al-Baṭalyawsī
1052 - 1127 (75 years)
Abū Muḥammad ʿAbd Allāḥ ibn Muḥammad ibn al-Sīd al-Baṭalyawsī , also spelled Ibn Assīd or Abenasid, was an Andalusian grammarian and philosopher. He is the earliest Islamic philosopher from the West whose works have survived.
Go to Profile#16041
Ida Halpern
1910 - 1987 (77 years)
Ida Halpern was a Canadian ethnomusicologist. Halpern was born in Vienna, Austria. She arrived in Canada in order to flee Nazism in her native country, becoming a Canadian citizen in 1944. She worked among Native Americans of coastal British Columbia during the mid-20th century, collecting, recording, and transcribing their music and documenting its use in their cultures. Many of these recordings were released as LPss, with extensive liner notes and transcriptions. More recently, her collection has also been released digitally.
Go to Profile#16042
Henry Suter
1841 - 1918 (77 years)
Henry Suter was a Swiss-born New Zealand zoologist, naturalist, palaeontologist, and malacologist. Biography Henry Suter was born on 9 March 1841 in Riesbach, Zurich, Switzerland, and was the son of a prosperous silk-manufacturer of Zurich. He was educated at the local school and university, being trained as an analytical chemist. Suter joined his father's business, and for some years he engaged in various commercial pursuits.
Go to Profile#16043
Otto Andersson
1879 - 1969 (90 years)
Otto Emanuel Andersson was a Finnish musicologist. Andersson studied first at the Helsingfors musikinstitut , becoming a teacher there. He studied folklore and music from 1908 onwards, and gained his Ph.D. in 1923 at the University of Helsinki. From 1926 on, he held the Robert Mattsons chair in musicology and folklore at the Åbo Akademi. In 1906, he formed the Brage Society, dedicated to Finland's Swedish folk music and culture, serving later as the group's chairman and choirmaster.
Go to Profile#16044
Max Wilms
1867 - 1918 (51 years)
Carl Max Wilhelm Wilms was a German pathologist and surgeon who was a native of Hünshoven, which today is part of the town Geilenkirchen. In 1890, he earned his medical doctorate from the University of Bonn, and afterwards was an assistant to pathologist Eugen Bostroem in Giessen and to internist Otto Michael Ludwig Leichtenstern in Cologne. In 1899, he began training as a surgeon at Leipzig. In 1907, he became a professor of surgery at Basel. In 1910, he attained the chair of surgery at the University of Heidelberg.
Go to Profile#16045
Petrus Wesseling
1692 - 1764 (72 years)
Petrus Wesseling was a German philologist and jurist working in the Dutch Republic. He became famous as a philologist. Early life Petrus Wesseling was born to Gerardus Wesseling and Anna Reiners or Creter on 7 January 1692 Old Style. When he was 10 he lost his father. He then went to his uncle Wessel Reiners, a merchant in Emden. Here Wesseling visited the Latin school. Later he went to the Gymnasium Arnoldinum in Steinfurt, where he was educated in classical languages and theology. His main teachers were August Houck , Werner Justin Pagenstecher and Arnold Visch . In 1712 Wesseling ended his studies in Steinfurt with the disputation theologica de petra in Matthaei evang.
Go to Profile#16046
Henry Moore
1831 - 1895 (64 years)
Henry Moore was an English marine and landscape painter. Life Moore was born in York, a brother of both Albert Joseph and John Collingham, and the pupil of their father, William Moore. Henry was educated at York and was taught painting by his father. He entered the Royal Academy Schools in 1853, and exhibited his first picture, Glen Clunie, Braemar, at the Royal Academy in the same year. He was a constant exhibitor at the Royal Academy from that time onwards. He exhibited at the Portland Gallery from 1855 to 1860, and at the British Institution from 1855 to 1865. It was also in 1855 that he...
Go to Profile#16047
Vida Latham
1866 - 1958 (92 years)
Vida Annette Latham was a British-American dentist, physician, microscopist, and researcher, known for her work in publishing and her research on oral tumors, surgery, and anatomy. Early life and education Vida Latham was born in Lancashire in 1866 to a physician father. Her early education took place in Cambridge and Manchester. She earned her master's degree from the University of London in 1889; she published papers on tooth anatomy and pain in 1888 while working at a London dentist's office. She then moved to the United States because she could not practice in the UK with an American dentistry degree.
Go to Profile#16048
John Charles
1893 - 1971 (78 years)
Sir John Alexander Charles was the tenth Chief Medical Officer of the Home Office of the United Kingdom. Life Charles was the son of John Charles, a physician and JP who practised medicine in Stanley, County Durham. His mother was Margaret Dewar.
Go to Profile#16049
Al-Bahrani
1238 - 1299 (61 years)
Kamal al-Din Maitham bin Ali bin Maitham al-Bahrani , commonly known as Sheikh Maitham al-Bahrani was a leading thirteenth-century Twelver Eastern Arabian theologian, author and philosopher. Al Bahrani wrote on Twelver doctrine, affirmed free will, the infallibility of prophets and imams, the appointed imamate of `Ali, and the occultation of the Twelfth Imam. Along with Kamal al-Din Ibn Sa’adah al Bahrani, Jamal al-Din ‘Ali ibn Sulayman al-Bahrani, Maytham Al Bahrani was part of a thirteenth-century Bahrain school of theology that emphasised rationalism.
Go to Profile#16050
Eduard Sonnenburg
1848 - 1915 (67 years)
Eduard Sonnenburg was a German surgeon. He was a son-in-law to neurologist Karl Friedrich Otto Westphal. After receiving his medical doctorate in 1872, he spent several years as an assistant to Georg Albert Lücke at the surgical clinic in Strassburg. In 1876 he qualified as a lecturer of surgery at the university. In 1880 he relocated to Berlin, where he worked under Bernhard von Langenbeck and Ernst von Bergmann.
Go to Profile